Abstract

LOPES, Anchyses Jobim. Head of Medusa: from Caravaggio to Freud and Lacan - on painting and psychoanalysis. Estud. psicanal. [online]. 2019, n.51, pp. 25-46. ISSN 0100-3437.

Caravaggio: biographical data. His infantile castration fantasies expanded through family deaths brought by the plague and increased in adult life by public decapitations. Medusa’s myth in Greek mythology. Medusa’s head in Freud and Lacan texts. Description of Caravaggio’s work Head of Medusa. Self-portraits and beheadings in Caravaggio’s woks. The use of lenses and mirrors by Renaissance painters asssociated with Lacan’s description of the child’s experience of the mirror stage. The gaze: invocatory drive, scopic drive and as object a. The gaze and castration, violence and sublimation in Caravaggio’s work. The picture as a sublimatory device containing the death drive tamed by sublimation.

Keywords : Art and psychoanalysis; Mithology and psychoanalysis; Castration; Mirror stage; Scopic drive; Invocatory drive; Sublimation.

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